Consultant - Technical guidance on rehabilitation workforce and rehabilitation in primary care

  • Added Date: Monday, 13 May 2024
  • Deadline Date: Monday, 27 May 2024
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Qualifications

Purpose of consultancy

To provide technical guidance to WHO and Member States in advancing health equity for persons with disabilities, including providing guidance on advocacy activities.ย 

Background ย 

Globally, health and demographic trends are changing; populations are rapidly ageing, and people are living longer with chronic conditions and multimorbidity. More than ever, health systems are compelled to invest in primary health care and accelerate progress to universal health coverage. These endeavors are contingent on a health and care workforce with the capacity and competence to meet the evolving needs of populations. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has strained and disrupted health systems and caused a shift in economic policy priorities. The pandemic has highlighted the critical role of the health workforce in emergency preparedness and health security and positioned it as central to health system resilience. As countries work to deliver primary health care and essential services in the context of highly disrupted health systems, the need to protect, support and bolster the health workforce is more critical than ever.

Among the many and diverse health needs population currently experience, those that require rehabilitation are going largely unmet. Lack of access to skilled rehabilitation workers in low- and middle-income countries in particular poses a major barrier to people receiving the care they need, where they need it. Profound under-investment and widespread misconceptions regarding rehabilitation and its value to population health underpin the rehabilitation workforce crisis experienced in large parts of the world. Countries are compelled to take action, in particular to strengthen workforce production, regulation, and competency-based education and lifelong learning, but many lack the necessary data and technical tools to make meaningful progress.

In order to address this situation, WHO has intensified its efforts to strengthen the health workforce, including targeted efforts to address the rehabilitation workforce crisis. Among these efforts is the development of a Rehabilitation Competency Framework, including assessments and interventions for a range of health conditions; Guide for Rehabilitation Workforce Evaluation (GROWE) to assess the competencies and performance of the rehabilitation workforce in countries; a Guide for Rehabilitation Workforce Evaluation, the expansion of the National Health Workforce Accounts to include more rehabilitation occupations. To be truly impactful in countries, these resources need to be accompanied by technical assistance, advocacy, and resources to increase awareness and improve their useability, as well as support their implementation.

Furthermore, strengthening rehabilitation at primary care level is essential to meet the enormous and growing need across countries worldwide. Currently, WHO is developing a new technical product on integrating rehabilitation in primary care.

Deliverables

This vacancy is archived.

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